The Copyright Balance

It’s not just that copyright protection lasts absurdly long, still
protecting recordings made more than seventy years ago; it’s that
copyright, inherently, operates to the detriment of the public when
applied in retrospect, to works that have already been
created. Lester Young, alas, can no longer be incentivized to produce
these performances they’ve already been created. We won’t get any
more brilliant performances by Teddy Wilson if we protect these works.
All we the public get from applying copyright here is a restriction
on our ability to encounter magnificent works of art. Now of course,
copyright is only ever applied in retrospect, and if we always ignored
it when applied to already-existing works it would cease to exist, and
would therefore no longer serve its incentivizing function prospectively.

And there’s your copyright balance; what we seek is a way to give
creators enough of an incentive to create, but not too much, because
too much gives us, the public, too much of an impediment to actually
enjoying the works that have already been created.

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